To express smells, sensations that carry us away to places of happiness is not easy, and if in addition these smells are to be included in this package of sensations, things get complicated. Smell is a sensation that is directly related to a certain thing. The smell causes our memory to be affected by this or that. A smell can have a personality of its own, it’s a smell of…
I hope all of this, which it might seem as if I were saying to myself, may enable me to reflect my lovely memories of the Engadin in Switzerland. They are to blame for one of my recent obsessions, which is to go back to Sils whenever I can. For the last six years I’ve spent part of every summer in the little village of Sils-Maria.
On the other hand, how could I transmit these emotions to others by way of my sculptures or my works on paper? Can art express smell? Is colour is a way of sensing smell?
There are times when memory carries us off by way of a smell to a place where we feel happy. I doubt if we remember bad smells so assiduously, given that we human beings have this particular selectivity that allows us to recall the good and readily choose to forget the bad. Sils, for me, is full of good memories, good smells.
I have rather an optimistic personality, I love beauty, I like to remember. To remember Sils is to remember the fresh clean morning air, the lakes, the wood inside the houses, the smell that turns to perfume. Is it possible to wrap up all of that and take it home? I don’t think it would be easy, I would have done it already if I could.
It may be that smells do not express much more than what we remember, and I would even say it may be that we want to go back because we remember that smell. If that is so, thank you, thank you very much, lord of the smells.

Andreu Alfaro